Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  Which didn’t have a thing to do with the weather (or for that matter with the way Jim thought others saw him—sensitive and observant? a knower of things? was that him?) but one day years later while factually extending for the benefit of his own children how the Navajo Prince could be interested both in energy buzzing potentially in the soft valve-needles of the often overvalued tongue of the often largely wasted northern bison and in messages from mountain to mountain as moist air rises to cloud itself into waves and accumulating towers or a warm column stops rising at the top as if to come down spreading out in a stable deck or layer mushroom-like, Jim recalled that when he heard his grandfather Alexander speak thus of his grandmother Margaret feeling responsible for everything and then, yes, got kinda funny, he found he could answer (who knew? forever) his own question in this instance re: that odd rotational storm of (the Princess’s getaway) ‘93 or ‘84 (the symmetrical tornado)—two sides of the same whirl that, he took now for granted, was both bird and wake; and that cloud-aborted, downcoming funnel that whirled in to suck then upward like a later-model industrial vacuum all substances available, liquid, illiquid, and all objects even those that had not been objects a moment before, was Jim’s plain responsibility to take fact away from antifact, the second unaccounted-for egg in question from the former and Choor-bound bird, and distinguish the Hermit-Sojourner of New York (sometimes Inventor), who helped Margaret get away, from the lion that turned—tornado—into a wolf at his moment of dismembered truth; the ground-up horse bones, on one concretely remedial hand, from the my thy maw that, airborne, had its own air aboard; the downcoming and upgoing weathers later understood in such staircase documentation as the compression-warming-drying-evaporation descent cum the expansion-cooling-humidification-condensation-precipitation ascent, versus, on the other hand, in the midst of discussing downcoming and upgoing weathers the Anasazi healer’s view (reviewed by Margaret for her grandson Jim) that mountains drew heat upward from deep below Earth’s rock, hence the heating of air along the slopes, this literally a mountain way of thinking—a mountain capability—since thinking was "Aimed Being" versus the Hermit-Inventor’s view that if there was any of this subterranean thinking going on it was more dreaming. But the less restlessly scientific Anasazi didn’t believe mountains dreamt, while the Hermit-Inventor held to the notion (the "motion," said the intuitive Anasazi lightly at a distance of many miles nonetheless audible) that western gravity created some heaping of friction in the molecular cascades of slopes, a turbulence heat form although it might conversely feel skin-cold. This stuck zone-wise in Jim’s mind so he never thought it prevision till he arrived years later (and ludicrously) at a visual formula for wind flow, he no scientist, while traveling in a small plane that lost its "lift" during a slow descent and then the pilot lost control a moment later coming in in the wake of an airliner’s takeoff. Jim did not or could not ask his partner Grandma in the aforementioned discussion of two weathers (and a new batch of toasty crullers) what on earth she meant implying that even in the actual absence of Jim’s mother’s body something was there underground in the cemetery locus of the Mayn family area—perhaps because he felt responsible for having spied on his grandmother when she wept (but she never wept!) one night on the back porch, Jim in the dark out there, loose and free, upon the damp, dark lawn of the yard where his part-Creek rival the (behind-his-back called) /za//breed halfback, was sometimes employed by Margaret to weed or to trim hedges at fifty cents an hour, who had a mother who probably cried from time to time.

  So, while it was with "I am responsible" derived from Alexander’s characterization of Margaret that Jim had solved (oh for God’s sake let’s get out onto the field) questions re: (a) wake and bird, and (b) why at a certain juncture of discussion he could not ask Margaret something about his recently departed mother, he had a lingering doubt, for after all he had answered his own question and perhaps had his own way or had in the parlance of later times no feedback, cruller’d or disturbing. Yet Margaret did disturb him when she retorted that she had said nothing about this or that—nor had she ever known anything about a symmetrical tornado, he could have made that up, although she granted that the East Far Eastern Princess had in fact been turned into a mist to facilitate her being spirited into the great Statue (that had floated dismembered into that aging harbor of the East one day to be there recomposed and to stand up strong and centered) during the last throes of the Princess’s return home—so that years later, when the man Mayn found himself desultorily absorbing a concept of convergence-flow in the theory of storms, he recognized not only that back then in the fall of ‘45 he had felt he would one day know what such inklings meant, he felt even that then (and then later) he had been in some angle or isle of the future already: this he had rather not be thinking about, for there was so much else, yet why could he not ask Margaret what he did ask Alexander, Was that skinny old geezer and the Hermit-Inventor of New York one and the same?—to which Alexander replied that there had been two or three of them, very bright, sleazy chaps, taking long vacations for generations in the western lands, apparently experimenting in the control of the atmosphere but entering at times too easily into the lives of impressionable young people though he thought Jim might not agree. But it was not satisfying the single solution for the paired questions, it was like when they all sat around after his mother’s suicide (he did not like the word, it was awful, it was as embarrassing as something he might never know), the family friend Jeanette Many’s fringed tweed shawl had the same look, same protoplasm or something, as the sandwiches, whole-wheat, and as the hands of others there, like they were shrugging off their differences and yielding their one common substance, so their equality had to be fought against or it would be your death too, or fought for so you’d come into possession of what you had anyway. And years later he felt that unbeknownst to him he had been some scientist in those fearsomely exciting bereaved days but when he found how at fifteen he had been in future e’en to understanding those shear zones along wind boundaries where friction increases dangerously he later had not your true scientist’s interests in such, though still a law or two or three from the old days such as 4’Answer the question that has been asked, not some other question, O.K.?" from which extended a corollary (pronounced by the depressed geometry instructor at Jim’s high school with the stress on the secundo syllable), namely, when possessed of an answer (especially when it has become conscious within self) make sure not to marry it (as they say aboard ship of line and cable) to the wrong question, that is, find the question that has asked this answer. Later answers increased so crazily that their content mattered less than their spirit, if that is possible; meanwhile, he, part-distracted by that dynamic virgin his grandmother in her earlier incarnations, revealed another answer to himself which was that responsibility or "I am responsible" wasn’t the only answer to the second pair. For, still unsatisfied, he saw that past equaling present would do equally well for the tornado’s wake being the bird as for the discussion of downcoming and upgoing weathers coinciding with the question he could not ask Margaret about his mother, since in so many ways the silly old humdrum weather was his future, or what he later surprisingly turned his hand to, events in that sphere of vapor, so that in that original juncture, the present equaled the future, which was another way of saying past equaled present, though only his nerves did these equations, he didn’t shed no blood for them, from day to day.

  But what if Margaret’s "I am responsible" was the answer to the first pairing? He reached that point one Saturday afternoon when his brother Brad paused at bathroom’s threshold to watch a drop of blood pass from Jim’s face into the basin as the elder shaved. Then the same occurred to Jim that night in the front seat of a borrowed pickup truck when for the third time he found Marie—Anne-Marie Vandevere—her neck, her bared feet, the whirlpoolings of her ears, her way (it was a way) of not wearing a bra, carrying him beyond the quiet laughter of their happiness into a winglike breathing that was alive in what it was missin
g, which was a—call it a full-length naked realistic halo (read hello/)—he didn’t know then but years later found some capacity in him to maybe recall it, though its being a "visual" half-blocked, half-revealed a fact of life he succeeded in not thinking about by concentrating on Marie— anyhoo some aura that nonetheless warn’t about her for she was realer so maybe ‘twas someplace else if you had to go look fer it but if you didn’t, why then Marie was here, at least for the time being till graduation do us part (and she never mooned over him though she would have gone with him when he left Windrow, yet worth noting is that she did not get pregnant, not at first, and then not later, when they took to consciously talking about it, and he never asked her if she had used some foam or something to begin with, but many years later when a colleague from South America named Mayga (he never saw her name written) passed out of his life, he wanted to put in a phone call to Marie in whatever later life she had made for herself to check if he was right recalling that she listened with marked care and only a smile or two but with some sensuality of paying attention to what he said as if she believed its truth more than he and wanted to convey this to him, to wit about the Margaret-Princess-Hermit-Anasazi scene shifts and shelvings across the inverted floors of a still recognizable continent, a wider load than would feasibly in terms of profit margin pass all those highways that brought the Wide Load itself into being and motion unless we invented a system, you see, if it could only develop from those fingers in his fifteen-year-old head that were Marie stroking him while he murmured nice jokes to them both and she had no concern about dislodging her aura because she didn’t have any, leastways not for him and possibly not for her father either, which was due partly to her, a very clear upstanding person even supine—’cept maybe way inside her there’s an aura taken for granted, though her fingers, having proceeded right into his head, frankly said, There are other women, and among these others seeded faithfully in him were some disappearing acts (spelled ax) wind-driven as the vessel of his own damned mother’s unburiable suicide where excessive drama and words sometimes met in embarrassed agony; and if you could be embarrassed (at school, for instance—as if his mom had left his dad—and at college where he rarely spoke of it except to a woman now and then in a moment of lusty sentiment, and still later, when it had become history without ever having been understood and he could tell a colleague with a hoarse laugh named Ted and a friendly woman named Mayga also a colleague though as professionally elusive as she was personally solid and right there during some early, early evenings in the bar of a Washington hotel hearing him say that if you could be embarrassed about a terrible, paining, destroying, living thing like that . . .) maybe that meant his mother (God bless and damn her for the medium she chose, namely solitude and seawater) was not dead: for that’s what he couldn’t explain to himself very well, much less Alexander, his well-shod grandfather, who anyway was saying a thing or two that rocked Jim back (no joke—only back, not forth, only back, like our undiscovered energy window warping out of age and time, we once believed)—that if Margaret’s "I am responsible" was the one unifying answer to the first of those increasingly distant pairs of questions that years later surprised him as if from behind though standing obstacle-like and sensual under his nose, his tongue, his hand, his foot, his eye which is one window of your windows that can tell us things without even being operated on—how did he use, then, at fifteen, such syllables as "substance" and "process," they were little more to him than the battlement-gray scenery he helped his little half-ass brother Brad tack up for a school play that required a trapdoor so a ghost had somewhere to come from and call from, sing from (almost, the way that spook sounded when the play was actually put on instead of being there potential and silently exciting on the shadowy daylight stage of the auditorium with sets gathering paint and nails as if the voices working were keeping the story of the play from leaping up out of nowhere which you had to put off till it could leap out from somewhere or just walk out) then Margaret’s "I am responsible" was the single answer to the plural questions, What were Margaret’s tears made of, that night on the bright-dark back porch when she thought she wept only for her own and for her husband’s eyes (and ears)? and How did the Navajo matron regain life the night her son madly departed in pursuit of the Princess who was in turn leaving because it was time to and though she loved the Navajo Prince the Hermit-Inventor had all but impelled her to go: yet then, as buriable as Jim and Brad’s seaward mother was not or at least not yet, came a next space of thought which reasoned its drugged conclusion downward into some sleep of Jim’s growing body and so as it got clearer got deeper from the acoustic air where it could have been said, and Best thing was to go on, as Jim’s friend Sam’s petite mother in a large, dark straw hat said quietly to Margaret at a gathering soon after Sarah’s suicide to which Margaret bluntly and as always with no blur of conscience or guilt replied, Oh that’s what we all say and next thing you’ll be telling me that time heals all wounds

  reels all moons, congeals all ruins, steals all sounds—for divorce!) —the conclusion too thought to be true, surely, that Margaret was at once responsible in the substance of her most rare tears for her daughter’s untimely evacuation and in her storied narrative of the East Far Eastern Princess’s roughly eastward exit responsible for the also departing Navajo Prince’s mother’s recovery: because if the tales she had been telling her favorite grandson who ran like the wind and could gallop a middle-sized black pony bareback around the edges of the Quirks’ horse-corn fields at age twelve (and at age fifteen in the middle of the night in the general direction of the Grange and a house near it where two girls might have gone to bed by now) were in some godawful way true, didn’t that mean that Sarah Mayn, whole mother of Brad and Jim, half-wife (as they say precisely in one ancient scientific marriage-culture) of Mel, and sister of Marian who now distantly makes her home in a suburb of Boston, and daughter of Margaret and of Alexander, . . . "lives on," said Warren Winecoop (as if listing the coming week’s events) from the pulpit of a church not much frequented by Margaret or Alexander, "in the memories of those who loved her": so that, quite apart—apart—apart from the atomic question of whether he could or did love his singular mother after an action so unforgettable, he was confused enough to be derailed from responsibility, Margaret’s or for that matter his mother’s (for maybe she had acted responsibly), and was much taken by his grandfather’s remark, that latter-day porchside qum friendship, that the Hermit-Inventor of New York, as, strangely, Jim’s uncomplimentary grandfather went on calling the skinny old geezer’s 1945 manifestation—whatever it was he had invented—had confided in him things he had never told Margaret though adding, to Alexander, that he was another man entirely from that sensible, methodical guy who told Margaret to go west in 1885 on Bedloe’s Island amid the pre-ruin of the Statue of Liberty: yet, Alexander went on, he sure as hell had the look (though sick, now) of the man he had briefly seen when Margaret returned home from the West in ‘94, same weird bone-ridged forehead so you expected to see through it, same crappy clothes and scuffed shoes, no, he had sneakers now, same irritable and confidential manner, told Alexander of all things that the Anasazi, who knew more about the weather than he was saying, had been the only man then known—i.e., in that century or apparently in that area in earlier centuries—who for certain had never been reincarnated but been only himself, his long self, and who upon dying had been bound to be but a memory, which was fine by the Anasazi, as he always had said though never guaranteeing the truth of this fact about him gleaned first from the spiny-sinewed bicycling botanist Marcus Jones who had it from Mena the Chilean zoologist specializing in javelina-peccaries, their possibilities, their hind-mounted scent glands and luminous lips the hue of moon-drenched cactus flesh peeled by the eyes of an elf owl that on certain nights shares its being with a female seer much as the cactus shares its with the owl or at the least the owl’s eye: yet key here (though key to what was not yet sure) was what Marcus Jones on the locoweed-naming jaunt told the
Hermit-Inventor (who upon meeting him under a red crag near where thermonuclear devices were even then latent and to be unearthed had expatiated and complained how New York had so changed just in the four or five months he’d been gone): to wit, that a certain aged Indian healer had told Marcus’s friend the woman-naturalist Mena upon her one visit to his eyrie that we create our weathers partly then to observe them, that is, so that there will be something in front of us: we make them by entering into the four-cornered creation which when we do so by conceiving it as four corners meeting back to back not as four corners facing one another at a distance we live through again the one son becoming two, namely Destroyer and Born of Water, thence multiplied to four sons, namely Reared Underground, or the Double, and Changing Grandchild, which, because he had been able while still in the womb to see the future, the Anasazi had singularly always been, that is Changing Grandchild, which was why he stayed young or, if not young, alive, and in his singularity never could gain or want reincarnation as another kind of man or as a woman, say, though he had strange interior memories, like a happy worm moving round inside him, of a time when men and women were first created and did not fuck but the woman masturbated with a quill or a sour cactus or a stone if you could find it, that in its fleshiness bore hard future knowledge that one day it would be a stone used by a woman to beat her belly with and induce an abortion.